When is a sale not a sale? Hopefully you are
lucky enough to hear this question in the demented,
tilted voice of Frank Gorshin, who played The Riddler on
the old Batman TV show. If you are a writer, the answer
might be much worse than the question. Believe it or not,
amidst the vast torrent of rejection slips, an occasional
fish leaps from the stream and lands gasping at your
feet: a real live honest-to-goodness acceptance.

But just as the
fish out of water often gasps its last, your
"acceptance" may be as good as the paper it was
printed on but nothing more. Here are things that have
happened to me this early in my so-called career:

A) my story was
bought at professional rates and appeared over a year
later in a national, glossy magazine, I never got paid
and spent a lot of energy continually making the
publisher aware of the fact before eventually agreeing to
take a banner trade on their web site in exchange for the
money that would never be mine. The website subsequently
vanished.

B) my story was
bought at reasonable rates for a respected small-press
magazine, to be the cover story as illustrated by a
well-known artist. Said magazine folds. Story
subsequently is accepted for limited-edition hardback
anthology. Said anthology folds. Story goes on to
continue gathering rejection slips to this very day.

In an odd note, I
met the artist who was booked to do the cover of the
magazine that folded. He actually did the illustration
before the collapse. Hes going to print me a copy,
so Ill have most of that "magazine that never
was."

C) my story was
accepted over two years after being sent off, but after a
year of waiting I'd already sent it off to another market
which accepted it and has been trying to get the issue
published for over a year.

D) a well-paying
and popular webzine accepted my story to be published in
their next issue. Four months later, the editor sent a
form reject on the same story, apparently forgetting he'd
liked it enough to "buy" it the first time.

E) a Canadian
publisher took a story for an anthology. The book came
out only a half-year behind schedule, but a
merger-bankruptcy fiasco by one of the major Canadian
book chains nearly wrecks most of the smaller publishers,
including this one. No money forthcoming.

F) a respected
publisher announced a major anthology, submissions
flooded in. A few rejections dribbled back out over the
ensuing months, but nearly two years later, no word on
whether the book is real or whether anyone has actually
"sold" a story to this market.

For novels,
its not unusual to wait nine months or so to hear
word from an editor (and almost every time the answer is
"no.") If you have an agent, not only do you
get read faster and more seriously, you get to the right
editors first. But when youre sending off stories
to the markets, its almost trial-and-error, you are
floating with hundreds of other submissions. Editors are
pretty much mad little gods in their own tiny universes,
while writers are seven cents a dozen.

Still, an editor
should not need nine months to say "no" to a
3,000 word story. Most editors can tell by the middle of
the second paragraph whether the story is even worth
finishing.

Ive had
time-sensitive material that editors have asked to buy,
then eventually rejected long after the material was too
dated to send elsewhere. Ive had
"acceptances" that took over a year before the
contracts arrived. Ive had "sales" that
ending up costing me money.

Judging from the
horror stories I've heard from other writers, I've
actually been pretty lucky. Most of my contracts have
been honored, and no editor has buried my career yet. But
the truth is that sometimes having a story accepted is
not the end, it's only the beginning. Sometimes a sale is
worse than a rejection, because it ties up the story and
keeps it from other markets that might treat it more
kindly. That's why sane writers have skin of titanium
Teflon, and know that the marketing and publishing are
far less important than the actual writing..

When is a sale not
a sale? Too often.

When does it really
matter? Never, as long as you have another story on the
screen, rushing toward its final sentence.